I'm trying to install Windows XP 2600 on my: AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz 512MB RAM Aopen AK73 motherboard Aopen PA256 MX However, when I try to install... I get these messages at the bottom of the screen, saying its loading certain things to do with hardware. Then it says "starting windows" and I get a blank screen; then my monitor turns off. What can I do to fix this? Everything works fine on my other computer...

Well, for a start, if you're running 2600 at this very moment, you have RTM Eval, which means it'll expire in 180 days. RTM OEM (which hasn't been leaked yet) is what you want. That's the real final, non-expiring version that'll appear in stores. As for the problem -- could be a driver problem. Any oddball or unsupported hardware bits in your machine? Did you run the compatibility test before you installed it?

What video card do you have? Try booting XP into it's safe mode, look for any kind of ghost driver in the device manager.. You also might want to just completely remove the Display device in the device manager. The restart.

I had the same problem - I had the new Hercules Game Theater XP sound card, and an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card. pulled both and it boots fine. I was able to add in the SCSI card, but the Game Theater uses proprietary PCI extension of some sort - totally unsupported. :( Strip your PC down the the barebones, swap in an old video card and try again. Then add items one by one and reboot to find out what is causing the problem.

i have the same problem and still can't find the solution. the compatibility test ran ok and everything was fine until the actual setup screen popped up... the computer just powered off completely. I have tried to unplug all cards and cd-rom/rw and left only the video card and the harddisk, but there was still the same problem... could it be the video card has the problem but how come the compatibility test didn't say anything about it? also, can i boot the machine with the video card? thanx.

Just to let you know that there are apparent problems with WinXP and the GeForce AGP video cards. I couldn't install my XP Release Candidate 2 on my 8100, and on the microsoft XP newsgroups, you'll see many posts relating to being unable to install XP on systems that have the nVidia GeForce cards. Some people were able to install XP after physically taking out the nVidia card and putting in another spare card until after installation, then taking out the other card and reinstalling the nVidia card using Win2000 drivers. The install routine just won't let you install if the card is in your computer. I, unfortunately, don't have a spare video card laying around to try this with. Hope this issue is resolved with the retail version, but I doubt it. Probably have to wait for some sort of installation patch from Microsoft.

I can verify that Russell wrote. I had the 'Setup is starting Windows'-hang problem, like many others here, and couldn't figure out what the problem was. I tried everything, takin out all my cards, tryin to upgrade or clean install, boot from cd or from hdd - nothing worked. Then I read his message and tried it with another vga card, and it worked. The funny thing is that the card that I have and which failed was an ASUS V7100MAGIC AGP (geforce2mx-200 w/tv-out) and the one that worked was an ABIT Siluro w/geforce2mx-400 w/tv-out. So what I did was when I started setup I used the mx400 Siluro and when it was all finished I changed back to the original one - which now works fine.